The Inspiration Behind Fighter Pilot’s Daughter by Mary Lawlor

Fighter Pilot’s Daughter was one of the most difficult projects I’ve ever undertaken.  It was also probably the most important thing I’ve ever done for myself.  Putting the book together was like a process of self-therapy: it had a powerful stabilizing effect that stays with me now.  Part of this came with the clear account the research and the writing made of my family’s zigzagging past.

Like most military families, we moved a lot (fourteen times before I graduated from high school).  And like other Army fathers, my Dad was away often.  My mother and sisters and I would worry about his safety, especially when he was flying in war zones.  He would write my mother fairly regularly for a while, then his communications would dwindle off under the weight of more pressing matters close at hand.  This would leave us wondering how he was, and I often had nightmares of him being captured, imprisoned…

In spite of the fact that we missed him fiercely, Dad’s homecomings weren’t as easy as we expected them to be.  Familiar as he was, his tall frame in the doorway and his blaring blue eyes with that far-away look were strange and frightening.  After a while, we’d get used to him; but I wonder how long it would take him to get used to being home.  He’d been in such a different, all-male world where violence reigned.  At home, there were only women.  My mother and sisters and I knew little about what he’d been through, not just because we were too young to know but because a lot of what he’d been up to was secret.

We never talked about any of this, so our house was a tense, uneasy place when Dad came home.  Indigenous people in many parts of the world have rituals for bringing warriors home—practices aimed at diminishing the potency of trauma and other effects of prolonged exposure to violence.  I guess we’re starting to see something like this in the debriefings and psychological attention given to soldiers and marines returning from war.  But in the sixties there wasn’t anything like it.  Dads just came home, still warriors, and now being asked not to be.

The story of Fighter Pilot’s Daughter had to have a plot—not just the order of our moves but the dramas that accompanied them.  It was difficult enough getting all my father’s military records so I could see the the crazy chain of our moves from one place to another.  It was even harder to go back into memories that reawakened painful feelings of confusion and anxiety that came with being new all the time.  All those scenes where I was a stranger and everybody else belonged still stung.

Making a story out my family life meant describing my parents, sisters, and myself as if we were characters.  I had to give physical portraits, convey personalities and make us say things.  The truth had to be the first priority, but the truth can be messy.  These portraits had to be shaped so readers could make sense of who I was talking about.  I think human character is, in the end, more complex than any literary character.  Picturing human beings in their ordinary rawness is very difficult.  A reader needs a writer to give their literary characters more specific shape and continuity than most of us usually have—features that allow a reader to recognize a person from one page to the next.  In memoirs and biographies, those shapes and continuities have to be made from real materials—the habits and speech styles and surprising ticks of real human beings.  So my family members and me ended up appearing in the book in more definitive shape than we actually had.  Still, these descriptions adhered to the truth of my memory as much as I could make them.

     Writing Fighter Pilot’s Daughter gave me a chance to air the ragged feelings still running in my brain and heart from those days long ago.  Some of these feelings had to do with the work my father did.   As a teenager, I had a hard time understanding how I felt or should feel about the things he did as a warrior.  When I went away to college, I drifted from my parents and made friends with people in left political groups and the anti-Vietnam War movement.  In Paris, in May of 1968, I participated in demonstrations against, among other things, the war my father was fighting At the time, he was posted outside Saigon.  When I saw him again, the tension between us was almost too much.  We had heated arguments, and then for a long we didn’t speak.  Much later my parents and I got to be very close, and I’m deeply grateful for that.  Being retired from military life, Dad had changed dramatically.

I wanted to write about all this so I could sort out those powerful emotions that were still with me.  I hope Fighter Pilot’s Daughter strikes a chord with other military kids.  And I hope it gives readers in general a better understanding of what military kids go through.  When I tell people I grew up in an Army family, they often say Was it like “The Great Santini”?  It’s surprising how often people ask that.  The answer is no.  Santini was an abusive father, and while many soldier fathers are professionally familiar with violence, they don’t necessarily bring it home with them.  Pat Conroy, author of The Great Santini tells a great story, but as he says himself it’s his story, not a representative account of military family life.  His book is is one of the few that features a Marine Corps pilot, his wife and children as the central characters, so it often gets taken as a model of  military family life.

I hope readers of Fighter Pilot’s Daughter see that there are other ways of describing domestic life for service families.  Many of the biggest difficulties for spouses and children are built into the structures of everyday life in military environments.  I hope readers take from my book a sense of how complicated it is to maintain a healthy, optimistic family life when you’re  having to move all the time and when a parent has to spend long months away from home on deployments.  For all the good or ill the armed services might do for America, they can bear down hard on the lives of soldiers’ wives as kids.  And they can make make their lives wildly interesting, as I hope Fighter Pilot’s Daughter shows.